Frosthaven! It Begins! (For me, anyway...)

 Frosthaven! It Begins! (For me, anyway...)

A long while back, I had the privilege of playing Gloomhaven with some very close gamer friends of mine. Unfortunately, we were only able to play during some weekends dedicated to gaming, which only happened so often. The group moved onto Tabletop Simulator (TTS), but that's just not my speed. I've tried, truly. But I'm really tactile when it comes to games. I can really hone in and focus while playing a boardgame, but when I play online, I just get distracted and my mind starts to wander. So they kept playing, but I dropped out. 

Fast forward nearly a decade, and 3 of the 4 of us are getting together nearly weekly to game. It's mostly to RP (which I'll detail in other posts once I decide how i want to write about them!), but we did say that we wanted to break up the RPing with a different game once a month or so. My buddy Cush had backed Frosthaven, and I was really excited about the prospect of playing. I never got back to Gloomhaven, but not for lack of interest. I love campaign games! I just haven't had time or consistency available for them in literal years. So we started a Frost Haven campaign to be played once every four weeks. I knew from the start that I would be choosing between the Boneshaper and the Deathwalker. I read Boneshaper first, and then I don't think I really read much about the Death walker other than peeking at the class' strengths and weaknesses at the bottom of the infocard. I'm almost always drawn to various classes of Necromancy in games like this, so it's always my starting place. I was also perfectly happy to pick something that I thought would complement Biff and Cush's class choices. Cush chose the Drifter, and Biff went with the Blinkblade. As such, it felt like we had enough of a formidable physical presence that I could afford to pick something far more support. So I decided to roll with the Boneshaper. Broadly, the Boneshaper Summons undead minions, and heals their allies. Absolutely in my wheelhouse of interest!

Now, while Cush and Biff had a ton of experience with Gloomhaven, and I remembered a lot of the basics, it had been years since we had played. And of course, they added an Outpost phase to Frosthaven. So we had to relearn some stuff, and that slowed us down a bit. A lot of other commitments I had pop up over the summer meant we were not getting together as consistently, so it really stretched out when we could play Frosthaven. So we didn't have a lot of continuity, and the rules (particularly for the Outpost phase) weren't quite sticking in our heads, so we had to re-learn some stuff again and again, regularly going back into the rule books. As such, at some point, we had kind of paused it. Cush and I were still interested in playing, but the Outpost phase wasn't really for Biff, and so he was happy to step back and stick with RPing while Cush and I continued with Frosthaven on a more consistent basis outside of our normal RPing time.

I'm maybe trying to juggle too many games at once, but here we are anyway...

Cush and I agreed to start a new campaign (as we'd only gotten so far anyway), so we started just last week. This copy of Frosthaven belongs to Cush, so I told him to pick whatever character class he wants to play, and I would pick something complementary to his choice. Cush ultimately decided to roll with the Banner Spear for the first mission, and was confident that he would then two-hand the rest of the campaign between the Banner Spear and the Drifter (since he was already very familiar with the Drifter, and the complexity isn't so high as to be overwhelming). Given this, I knew I could return to the Boneshaper in that support role. And I had enjoyed playing the Boneshaper! But I decided that after playing the Boneshaper for several missions, I wanted to try a different class. So I started this campaign with the Deathwalker.

We could have just skipped the first scenario, honestly, as it's optional and does not necessarily contribute terribly much to the campaign. However, given that our first attempt at Frosthaven felt so fragmented and we are now only trying to find times that line up for two players rather than three or more, we decided to play the intro scenario since we knew we had enough time to play a "real" scenario after we finished the intro. I think the rules for Frosthaven are generally pretty thorough. However, one thing I will say that bothers me is that if I do not read the instructions closely enough the first time through, it's easy to miss some stuff, such as deck setup for the intro scenario. Then, later on, we spend time looking for where it might be, and it's not terribly easy to find.

Admittedly, using a magnifying glass to examine nature is much more engaging and fulfilling than using said glass to comb over game rules...

Intro mission went smoothly, and we were both very happy with our character class choices. While I really enjoyed playing the Boneshaper, it often felt like I was doing a lot of "hurry up and wait," because I had to get my Summonses out, and then try and herd them into position. It felt as though the Banner Spear and Drifter were doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Which I don't mind! I like playing support classes! But in the case of our first attempt at the campaign, I felt less like I was functioning in a support capacity, and more like I was functioning in a hanger-on capacity: if I got a kill, cool. If I helped with a mission, that's neat. Otherwise, I mostly just hung back and picked up loot because I couldn't afford to get too close to the action. I still enjoyed playing as the Boneshaper, but I'm much happier with the Deathwalker.

I still feel comfortable in a support capacity, but now, I feel much more involved in the action, rather than being the kind of character who waits for opportunities, and then takes advantage of them. Coordinating the Shadow tokens is, for me, far more fun and interesting than dropping a whole bunch of minions, and then trying to get them where they need to be in order to be effective. I'm going to dig a bit deeper into the Deathwalker in a future post. Not that I am an expert, or have a ton of experience with her yet, but I'm excited about her, and I find that's one of the best times for me to write about stuff like this, and do a soft deep-dive: when I'm enthusiastic about what I have done with a character/class/etc. so far, and what I'm thinking I might be able to do with them in the future.

For our second mission (and first *real* mission), we were able to plow through, grab a decent amount of loot, and win the mission without breaking too much of a sweat. We might be upping the difficulty soon, because while we were at some risk of being exhausted before the end of the scenario, it didn't really feel as though we were in trouble at any particular point. The one moment was when we opened the door at an inopportune time, and could've gotten swamped with baddies. But most of them took a minute to get to us, and never quite managed to bottleneck us. The Drifter basically exploded out of the door into the room, and started knocking down enemies. In this case, too, the Deathwalker's ability to basically teleport using her Shadows meant I was also not worried about getting bottle-necked. I knew I could get past the clog. My question was whether or not I could survive if I ended up on the other side by myself. Thanks to the Drifter, it ended up being a non-issue, and my question never needed to be answered. We ended the evening just at the start of our first Outpost Phase (which is a place that, again, we struggled the first time we tried to play Frosthaven).

As you can tell, I didn't snap any pictures of the board. It has been so long since I was regularly posting to this blog that I didn't even think to document what I've been playing. As such, this is obviously a really broad overview of the start of our campaign. Moving forward, I plan on sharing pictures, some round to round recaps, that sort of thing. I will be including campaign spoilers, too. The game has been out long enough (about a year and a half) that I think it's okay to do that. If you're not up for reading them, that's cool! Let me know, though, and enough people say so, I will likely find a way to hide those spoilers so you can still read about the game without necessarily needing to read spoilers for the story and reveals.

I cannot stress enough how excited I am to finally be playing a campaign game again! There was a stretch during which I was playing games like Descent and Imperial Assault regularly, and I enjoy them so much. But it's been a long time since I had availability and capacity. While my expectations for Frosthaven are decent, I don't think they're outsized, and I'm confident that I will be very happy with the gameplay. Looking forward to sharing an update after our next session at the end of the week!